


art in seasons (a winter fling)

by north neilivian (silveryspring)



Category: NU'EST
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguity, Ambiguous Relationships, M/M, ambiguous at its finest i assure you, mainly imaginery than actual plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 21:29:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17691404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveryspring/pseuds/north%20neilivian
Summary: i see you and me in a world of colors.





	art in seasons (a winter fling)

**Author's Note:**

> i don't even know. this just an image coming to my head. and before i knew it, it was written.

"You're a day dreamer, Jonghyun-ah" Choi Minki said, and his smile was like ice. "You live in worlds that don't exist. You see things that I could never hope to imagine."

Jonghyun had trouble deciding if his words were critical or admiring. This boy shimmered with a light that condensed around him in small, barbed wires and braids, something that in all his worlds of make believe, he had never seen before. This boy was an odd... specimen. Perfectly human and normal in every way, yet everything but.

How Jonghyun hated him.

"I see you," The words spilled from him in a matter-of-fact answer. "I see a world with too many people in it, and oceans draining dry, and plastic images of beauty."

Were bells chiming from inside of the boy's throat? Minki jumped down from the edge of the lotus pond and cackled. "You're too kind." He let those graceful arms slope down Jonghyun’s neck as He continued on, black hair shining like paint, so mystifying in a predatory, terrifying way - "What do you really see?"

x

He didn't.

Lie awake, lie awake, lie awake. Still, nothing.

The dreams didn't come easy anymore. his canvases were empty. The world shone in a sickly black that he hadn't witnessed, pressing against the window panes, slipping between the fabric of the curtains, underneath the lines in Minki's smile. Jonghyun lied awake and there was only empty space. He swore that his face had changed. grown older, somehow. Minki promised it would.

God I hate you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you ---

And repetition didn't make it less real.

"You're seeing things again?" Minki asked, looking up from the book in his fingers. Sepia pages worn thin with time. He was rereading another romance novel. "do the shapes flow easier at this time of night?"

"No," Jonghyun replied, turning his head to look up at Minki. "I see nothing." That amber gaze floated again to the ceiling, cracked and pale like the whites of his eyes, perfectly happy without the touch of one's fingers. "Absolutely nothing."

x

Winter flows like a blooming tendre; an intense, beautiful display of white. The lack of hue began to inspire something new in him, and it'd been so long since he'd felt that, so long since he found something worth seeing, or living, or experiencing. The physical manifestation of a year value of feeling. He found it at last.

There had to be no color. None.

He smiled as black ink splattered across his easel, a flow of colors flooding from the garbage on the curb. paints, all of them, reds and yellows and green. colors to stain the snow. Let them melt away. Jagged tree limbs stretched from his fingers and onto his paper as he expressed the days, furiously making brushstrokes, needing to make his insides real. authentic as the rigadoons inside his head.

Love?

Minki smiled as he walked across the room, though there was an underlying blue like the paint Jonghyun had cast away. "It's snowing,” he began, gently wrapping a scarf around Jonghyun’s neck. "Do you see the children making snow angels? do you see anything?"

"I see the snow, yes." Condensation spilled from his mouth and wrapped the air in a chilling encirclement.

"The world is frozen over and ready to sleep."

"Are you?"

"Am I what?"

"Ready to sleep?"

"Almost," So now Jonghyun understood, his hand picking up pace with his current composition. "Just let me finish this painting."

x

Autumn reeked of blood and Jonghyun wouldn't stand for it. The albums were empty. He traced his hands. The crunch of leaves was like the sound of a manic heart shattering against his ribs in the anticipation of the solstice again. Even the trees were weeping orange.  
As this realm fell and crumbled around him in shades that he'd long since retired, he felt hands touch his body in smooth, calculated strokes. Outside, the sound of groaning branches filled his head and he imagined them covered in frozen water, their flames extinguished.

"Wake up," Minki pushed him again. such forceful prods. so far away. "Open your eyes, will you?"

Minki had glued leaves all around his room.

"Why did you do that?" Jonghyun asked, confused and partially sickened. Orange. God he hated that color.

"You don't see them anymore, do you?" There was a certain amount of tearage in his companion’s voice, a frequency slowly growing distant. "Your worlds were bright once, I know they were. You and me. A world of vibrance." A pause that was quickly lost to the season. "Where are they now?"

"Winter," Jonghyun replied, turning his eyes inward as he closed them once again. "In an endless winter."

x

Spring was the worst. everything was coming to life again, and Jonghyun was not. His skin had grown paler than anything Minki had ever seen before, bones growing closer to his skin little by little, insects gnawing away at the inside of a tomb. Pink was everywhere. He once tried to staple flowers to the inside of Jonghyun’s walls, laughing as he surrounded his Jonghyun with color, mocking the fact that he couldn't escape it now.

Funny how Jonghyun merely looked away.

The ink was retired for scratches with a pencil. Minki would have to refill the tin. Why was Jonghyun always doing this? What was he searching for? Did he not understand that this endless obsession with portraying the void inside of him would be his end? Only one person tried to make him see color again, a strange dame with black pools for eyes and a flash of black hair.

But as it was said, Jonghyun merely looked away.

"Are we still an endless winter, then?" Minki sat atop an antique table, swinging his legs back and forth, the odor of carnations wafting through his lungs, bleeding down the walls.

"Yes," Jonghyun responded, trailing a hand down the room. the sensation of petals and stems tickled his palms. "Endless, remember? Not just until tomorrow."

Minki’s footsteps echoed behind Jonghyun, stopping just as his presence was felt in Jonghyun’s spine, trickling downwards and making him shiver. "Is that all we ever were, love?"

"What?"

"An endless winter?"

"No, no that's not what I meant." His eyes refocused. spring glistened brightly, sparkling around Minki in pinks, yellows, and red. Flowing around him in circuits. flooding the sidewalks. nothing became everything. "I just wanted to know," Jonghyun took a breath, slightly amazed that he remembered how. "What did you call me?"

x

Good night, the dusk is endless. and it is still a living, breathing thing.  
Jonghyun’s face had aged considerably in all of the solstices that had passed, proving that they weren't as endless as he'd love them to be, that the only entity with eternal youth was the loneliness he'd let fester before, and only now, after so long, Minki was finally beginning to understand.

"I had never known," Jonghyun began, the slight wrinkles on his face curving with his smile. road maps of experience. charts of seasons. "Was it hatred or actual friendship?"

"I'd always assumed hatred," Minki said simply, with a small shrug. "You don't think of winter as the season for flings."

"But I'd never hated you." Jonghyun swallowed suddenly, glancing over at Minki, his face like the linen he lied upon; white and creased, the pattern of snow. "I never did."

"Had you forgotten about me?" The other asked, clutching his hand tighter, feeling how little heat was left inside his body from so many years wasted.

"You asked me once if we were still an endless winter, dear." Jonghyun shook his head as a tear dripped from his eyes. Spring was coming. "we always were. everyday I was convinced you'd go, physical interactions only last so long. I knew, eventually, you would go --" And don't we all? Blooming in the spring, flourishing in summer, withering in fall and dying in winter, who are we to brave eternity? "Yet you stayed with me, and watched this strange bout of annual wanderings overtake me as I sought to find an answer to this loneliness. I saw only you and me, in a world that time stood still for. the children didn't make snow angels. We were the snow angels. We didn't simply see the world anymore, love. We were the world and everything in it, and no one could change that."

Minki’s existence suddenly seemed a shade more colorful as Jonghyun reached toward the canvas, away from the black ink that he'd used for so long, towards the colors that lie splattered in the streets. "An endless winter does not mean that I was alone," He began, eyes suddenly flooding with light as he looked at Minki, having aged himself as the clock hands ticked forever onward. "Instead it meant that no one could take you from me."

Minki nearly cried as he whispered, "not even time." 


End file.
